1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to the field of automated resource control, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for receiving and transporting real time energy data from automated meter reading (AMR) utility meters.
2. Description of the Related Art
Since late in the 1800's, electrical power, natural gas, and water providers have been distributing these resources to consumers. And not long after larger distribution grids were deployed by these utilities, the problem of billing based upon consumption arose. Consequently, utilities began to install consumption meters for these resources at their respective points of consumption.
Accordingly, virtually everyone in this country and many countries abroad understand the role of the “meter reader,” for early utility meters provided only a visual indication of how much certain resource had been consumed over a billing period. Thus, in order for a resource provider to determine the amount of that resource which had been consumed over a billing period, it was necessary to dispatch personnel each time a meter reading was required. This typically occurred on a monthly basis.
This manner of obtaining usage data, however, was labor intensive and consequently very costly. In addition, because the act of reading a meter involved interpretation of the meaning of one or more visual indicators (typically analog indicators like the hands on a watch), these readings were subject to inaccuracies due to errors made by the meter readers.
In the past twenty years, developers have begun to address the problems of labor cost and inaccurate readings due to the human element by providing so-called automatic meter reading (AMR) meters, the most prevalent type of which broadcast their current values in a known and encoded low power radio frequency transmission capable of being captured by a corresponding AMR receiver in a moving vehicle. Hence, AMR technologies substantially alleviate the limitations of former meters related to accurate readings and markedly addressed the cost of labor required to read meters.
But in order to deploy AMR products, the resource providers had to completely replace their existing inventory of meters—literally hundreds of millions of meters—at substantial expense, the bulk of which was conveyed either directly or indirectly to consumers.
In the past ten years, developers have responded to demands in the art for so-called “smart meters,” that is, meters that allow for two-way communication between a resource provider and a point of consumption. Two-way communications between a provider and a meter, also known as automated metering infrastructure (AMI) yields several benefits to the provider because with AMI the provider is no longer required to send out personnel to control consumption at an access point. With AMI meters, a utility can turn on and turn off consumption of the resource at the consumption point without sending out service personnel. And what is more attractive from a provider standpoint is that AMI techniques can be employed to perform more complex resource control operations such as demand response control.
The present inventors have observed, however, that to provide for AMI, under present day conditions, requires that the utilities—yet one more time—replace their entire inventory of AMR meters with more capable, and significantly more expensive, AMI meters. In addition, present day approaches that are directed toward providing the two-way communications between the utilities and their fleet of AMI meters all require the development of entirely new communications infrastructures (e.g., Wi-Fi, satellite) or they are bandwidth limited (e.g., cellular).
Consequently, what is required is an apparatus and method for providing AMI capabilities to existing AMR meters without a requirement to entirely replace or significantly modify the existing AMR meters.
In addition, what is required is a mechanism for deploying an AMI grid that minimizes the cost of metering and two-way communications upgrades.
Furthermore, what is needed is a smart grid technique that employs existing AMR meters and moreover leverages already deployed high bandwidth two-way communications infrastructures.
Moreover, what is needed is a cost-effective mechanism for reading existing AMR meter grids.
Further, what is needed is a technique that supports the deployment of wireless devices in a manner that security provisions are tailored according to proximity.
Also, what is needed is a topology assessment mechanism for deploying and maintaining wireless networks.
In addition, what is needed is a technique that allows end-to-end link quality in a wireless network to be easily quantified.
Furthermore, what is needed is a method for discovering a frequency hopping sequence in a system of devices such as AMR meters.
Moreover, what is needed is a large payload fragmentation scheme for use by a network of wireless devices.
Also, what is needed is a mechanism whereby a mesh network of wireless devices may optimally select bands/channels for transmission of messages to other devices in the network.